Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.
- Aaron, Act 2, Scene 3 (Titus Andronicus)

Despite their many revisions throughout the development of Captain’s Gambit, the core concept behind Titus has remained the same. Inspired by D.Va from Overwatch, Alvin pitched Titus as a “last-stand” captain. The idea was that right when they were about to die they would suddenly explode, taking multiple players down with them. By tying the amount of damage dealt to their blood, players could estimate the impact someone would have if they died and were secretly Titus. This created a tricky tension between killing Titus off early to reduce their reveal’s power, or leaving them alive as a potential ticking time bomb.

We originally created Titus alongside Rosalind during the 2nd phase of development (which was when we expanded the player count from 5 players to 4-8 players). At the time, Titus was significantly weaker than they are now. Here was his original card text:

From our early playtests, we learned that that while Titus was a lot of fun to play he had an abysmal win rate. Despite being able to kill off almost half the table with his reveal, he just never quite had enough gas to finish everyone off. We debated a few potential solutions, but ultimately decided to shelve his design in favour of Richard (who took his place as the 8-player Domination captain).

Thanks to the incredible support we got during our Kickstarter campaign, we decided to dust off Titus and figure out what was wrong with him. With the help of our awesome playtesters on Discord, we nailed down his 3 main issues:

He Died Too Easily Pre-Reveal: It was really important to us that there were ways to play around Titus’ reveal. Specifically, we wanted players to be able to choose not to kill Titus to avoid having him explode. But originally, Titus had the option to “self-destruct” by just calling every bluff until they died. To fix this, we made a change so that his Reveal no longer triggers from his own incorrect bluff calls. This made it so that only other players could trigger Titus’ reveal, but still let Titus taunt others into foolishly attacking him.
He Died Too Easily Post-Reveal: Setting Titus’ health to 1 was way too low. Without fail after revealing, someone would just Strike/Barrage Titus to finish him off. So we coupled his reveal with a significant blood-based heal to bump up his survivability.
He Didn’t Deal Enough Damage: As I mentioned before, Titus just didn’t have the firepower to actually win a game. So, we gave it to him. Not only did we bump up his damage from 2 damage/blood to 3 damage/blood, we also gave him a free burst of energy. This coupled with the heal mentioned above gave him the time and resources to Strike/Barrage off any straggles that weren’t defeated by his initial explosion.

With his gameplay design solidified, that just left us with his visual design. Aesthetically, our goal for Titus was to have him look like a cross between a Roman Centurion and a Protoss Zealot. In my opinion, I think Bo nailed this goal. With these final changes, Titus finally became the very powerful but fair captain we have today.